17: No Such Thing As A Bassoon In A Football Stadium

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Speaker 18 We ran it on QI a few years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Which was there's no such thing as a fish.

Speaker 19 There's no such thing as a fish.

Speaker 18 No seriously it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

Speaker 20 It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

Speaker 20 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber.
I'm sitting here with three other elves.

Speaker 20 We've got James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski, and on fact-checking duties, Andy Murray. And we also have a special guest today.
It's the creator of QI. It's the chief gnome himself, Mr.
John Lloyd.

Speaker 20 Today's episode is a special one. It is a tie-in for the final of the 2014 Brazilian World Cup, and we are going to be talking about nothing but football.

Speaker 20 Now, this is going to be quite interesting, given that none of us know anything about football, but we've done our research, and so we've once again gathered round our microphones, and these are the best football facts that we found out from the last seven days.

Speaker 20 So, in no particular order, here we go.

Speaker 20 Okay, fact number one, Anna.

Speaker 22 Yep, my fact is that the first known football chant was composed by Elgar.

Speaker 21 The first gnome football chant. That was in honour of me, the chief gnome or chant.

Speaker 22 Okay, let's clarify that Elgar wasn't a gnome.

Speaker 22 He's obviously one of our most famous composers. He wrote Land of Hope and Glory.

Speaker 20 Land of Hope and Glory is often used as a football chant.

Speaker 20 Yes, it is, isn't it? They sing, We hate Nottingham Forest, We Hate Everton II, We Hate Man United, but Liverpool, we love you.

Speaker 20 And they always change the teams, but the first team always seems to be Nottingham Forest because it scans properly. We're a bit harsh on Nottingham Forest, like every team hates them.

Speaker 21 The other thing about Elgar, he's the only major composer to have mastered the bassoon.

Speaker 20 Did you know that?

Speaker 22 So, when other composers were writing for the bassoon, were they just making it up?

Speaker 21 No, the bassoon is a very important thing in all sorts of ways. Darwin used to play the bassoon to worms on his billiard table to see if they had a sense of hearing.

Speaker 22 Because I know that Elgar stopped playing the violin because he decided he wasn't good enough. So maybe he did that thing of thinking, I'm a bit crap at all the mainstream instruments.

Speaker 22 Let's go for the weirdo that no one ever plays.

Speaker 20 Was he a footballer, Elgar?

Speaker 22 No, he wasn't, but he was a big fan of wolves. And he wrote a song called He Banged the Leather in 1898, which was actually before he became particularly famous.
He'd written a few pieces.

Speaker 22 And he wrote it because he went to stay with his friend Dora Penny, whose father father was a rector in Wolverhampton.

Speaker 22 And the first question he asked her when he got off the train was, so are we going to go and see a football match?

Speaker 22 And after that, they went and he cycled 40 miles from his home regularly to go and watch Wolves play.

Speaker 20 So how did he spread the chant initially?

Speaker 22 There's not much evidence of it being sung at the time. I think it was only discovered about 50 years after.

Speaker 20 Oh, okay. So it wasn't him being an embarrassing dad in the crowd, just going, come on, everyone, I'll play it on the bassoon.
You guys sing along.

Speaker 22 That's why bassoons are now banned.

Speaker 20 That's like the old school of a Mazella.

Speaker 20 People coming with their bassoons.

Speaker 20 The thing about Chance that I really like is it must... There was a referee, a very famous referee called Graham Poh.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 20 And he, on a show, sort of waxed on about how depressed he was about the fact that his surname rhymed with Hole.

Speaker 20 Because he just knew that, like, as soon as you join the football, you've got to look at every element of your life and just go, where can this be turned into? Oh, no, Paul, Hole. No.

Speaker 20 That's why Paul Enker never became a referee, I suppose. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 20 But it's got an amazing history, doesn't it? So I managed to find

Speaker 20 the who ate all the pies. Oh, yeah.
You know that famous chant? It supposedly,

Speaker 20 it gets traced back to a footballer who was a goalie called William Henry Fulk. Do you know William Henry Falk? Yeah, Fatty Fulk.
Was he a goalkeeper? Fatty Fulkes, he was a goalkeeper.

Speaker 20 This most extraordinary player. He was six foot four when the average size was five foot five.

Speaker 20 He used to bend the the crossbar. He would pull down on it to make the goal smaller to really bend in.
And he was just a furious guy.

Speaker 20 One time he disagreed with a referee about a call that made them lose a match. And so he nakedly ran through the stadium trying to find the referee.

Speaker 20 Naked, yeah. He was naked.
He hid himself in a broom cupboard, this referee, because he was so petrified and he started trying to rip the doors off.

Speaker 22 And he was fat.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 22 Was that a tactical thing?

Speaker 22 Because I've always wondered if there should be a width restriction on goal leads, because if you were fat enough you're just blocking the whole goal right I don't think that's possible

Speaker 20 although he did play cricket and apparently people used to joke that there was an appeal against the light whenever he was bowling

Speaker 20 a guy called on Twitter called at villainess stato he tweeted me about the football podcast and he told me about this goalkeeper called Lee Roos

Speaker 20 and his trick was quite quite clever really whenever a corner would go in he would sit on the crossbar so he was higher higher than everyone else, and then he'd launch himself from the crossbar to catch the ball.

Speaker 20 Wow, that's a pretty good trick. Yeah, that's a great trick.
If it works, yeah, I don't suppose they do it anymore, so maybe it doesn't work.

Speaker 20 You know, Osama bin Laden has his own chant, really, Arsenal. Yeah, it's Osama, whoa, whoa, Osama, whoa, whoa.
He's hiding in Kabul, he loves the Arsenal.

Speaker 20 He's a main Arsenal fan.

Speaker 20 He was a huge Arsenal fan, and when he lived in London, he actually went to a bunch of matches, bought a jersey which he brought back for his son, which was, I believe, Ian Wright.

Speaker 21 His son was Ian Wright.

Speaker 20 Fascinating.

Speaker 20 And he officially got banned by

Speaker 20 Arsenal from ever attending one of their matches on their grounds post-9-11.

Speaker 20 That was Arsenal's official response to the travesties of America.

Speaker 22 From 2004 to 2005, England got its first chant laureate, Johnny Hurst.

Speaker 22 The board that decided who he was going to be was chaired by Andrew Motion, who was obviously the poet laureate laureate at the time.

Speaker 22 And he was paid £10,000 for a year, which is twice as much as the poet laureate gets for his post to write chants. And you should look him up because they are appallingly bad.

Speaker 22 I mean, and Arsenal, actually, in 2008, I think, or I don't know, in the early 2000s, Arsenal released an official chant book and distribute it to its players, which obviously did not catch on at all.

Speaker 20 Well, like a hymns book.

Speaker 22 Basically, like a hymn, like standing up in assembly.

Speaker 20 At the first column, though, we will be singing hymn number 369. The referee's a wanker.

Speaker 20 Okay, Andy, have you got anything to add on chance? Yes, I have.

Speaker 20 We were on Charles Darwin earlier, and Darwin shouted at his earthworms in his last book, which was called the catchy title The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms with Observations on Their Habits.

Speaker 20 He played the bassoon to them.

Speaker 21 It's got a brilliant end, that book.

Speaker 20 So that's Darwin. I have found a I've found an article in the Guardian which says that Osama bin Laden was not a fan

Speaker 20 of Arsenal, but it's it's I think it's open to dispute because he was a fan of football in his younger days. So

Speaker 20 I reckon that one stacks up.

Speaker 20 Someone wrote after he was after he was killed, someone wrote on Twitter, after watching Arsenal yesterday, it was perhaps unwise for bin Laden to rush into his yard shouting out, come on the gunners.

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Speaker 20 Okay, let's uh move on to fact number two, and that is my fact, and that is that Eric Cantoner was raised in a cave. There's a good football chant about him, is there?

Speaker 21 Isn't there?

Speaker 20 Yeah, they did sing Ooh Ah Cantona, didn't they? A lot? And Man United still fans still sing about Cantona, even though he hasn't played for them for yeah.

Speaker 20 He even in the year that he was banned for fly-kicking a man in the head, still won Players Player of the Year.

Speaker 21 Prata accelerated When you say he was raised in a cave, Dan, do you mean a cave?

Speaker 20 Cave?

Speaker 20 A wine cellar.

Speaker 21 I'm sure it's a cave? He was French.

Speaker 20 He was French. That's true.

Speaker 20 Yeah, no, it was a lookout post that was used by occupying Nazis during World War II, then got abandoned, and his paternal grandparents arrived from Sardinia and they occupied the cave and they slowly renovated it over the years.

Speaker 21 Funny he didn't take up cricket rather than football. There's bats in there.

Speaker 20 Really got the tone of the lame jokes on the podcast down to a T.

Speaker 21 I'm in there like a rat up a pie, Panna.

Speaker 22 So, just speaking of growing up in caves, I was thinking about people

Speaker 22 who live in bizarre homes. There's a story in the news this week about a house in Wales that's gone up for sale for 425 grand, which has its own private train station where you can hail down trains.

Speaker 22 Isn't that cool?

Speaker 20 You can hail a train. Yeah.

Speaker 21 It's not uncommon at my mum's local station in Dorset.

Speaker 21 You stick your your hand out and the train stops

Speaker 20 where the Virgin Pendolino is going past.

Speaker 20 Eric Cantoner, he sits in the pantheon of those amazing football characters that you love almost as much for their social life as you do for their

Speaker 20 life on the field, on the pitch. Like Pele.
Pele's another one that I love. What did he do?

Speaker 20 There's an amazing ad where he was standing in a massive pitch looking around, going, you know, I've played in some of the greatest stadiums of the world.

Speaker 20 I've played amongst the greatest roaring fans fans that you could ever want.

Speaker 20 And then he goes into the locker rooms and he says, I've shared these locker rooms with some of the greatest players who've ever walked onto the pitch.

Speaker 20 And we spoke about everything, our lives, our families, our greatest fears. The one thing we never spoke about, though, was erectile dysfunction.
And then it turned into an adventure.

Speaker 20 And how you need to see your doctor if you're not getting it up. And yeah, I was just like, Pele, where's this come from? And he became the ultimate advocate of erectile dysfunction.
So go you.

Speaker 20 That's as exciting as your career to me.

Speaker 20 This is somewhat related. Another Brazilian footballer, Garinche, is very famous from the same era.
He lost his virginity to a goat, according to his official biography.

Speaker 20 Really? Yeah, apparently. He was on top, James.
That's the thing.

Speaker 20 I think the goat for the first half.

Speaker 20 His nickname was the Wren because of the way he ran, because one of his legs was shorter than the other.

Speaker 20 And when they won the World Cup, he got a bonus and he hid the money underneath his child's bed, forgot about it and then when he remembered he found out that his child had been wetting the bed for three years and it was completely ruined.

Speaker 20 Oh no.

Speaker 21 Talking of nicknames, do you know who Sulphus Nielsen was? I do not. He was nicknamed Krohlben or Bandy Legs and he was the first man to score ten goals in a national match.

Speaker 20 Really?

Speaker 21 Yeah, because his bandy legs made him very difficult to tackle because there was a sort of huge gap between where his legs should be

Speaker 21 in 1908 at the Olympics.

Speaker 20 We were talking earlier about Cantona kicking football fans. Yeah.
He's got nothing on this guy, Javier Flores.

Speaker 20 He was a Colombian midfielder and he'd lost a game, lost a football match and he was driving home and as he was driving there was a group of fans there and they started shouting weak, weak, weak

Speaker 20 and so he shot them. Whoa.

Speaker 20 And when he got brought up in front of the judge, he said that as he drove past it wasn't his fault, he was drunk.

Speaker 21 But I happen to know from having been a lawyer in my early youth that drunkenness is not a defence to murder.

Speaker 20 No, especially not when you're driving, I don't suppose.

Speaker 22 Because crime of passion can sometimes be a defence in France, can't it?

Speaker 22 I think France is the only country where for murder you can plead crime of passion.

Speaker 21 I read somewhere, I'm sure this is apocryphal, Andy will tell us, but it used to be a crime of passion to kill somebody for pinching your parking space in France.

Speaker 21 It's considered such an offensive thing to do

Speaker 20 to be let off.

Speaker 21 Are footballers by by and large

Speaker 21 underprivileged in terms of their upbringing, would you say?

Speaker 20 You would think it's a working-class sport in this country, you would think.

Speaker 21 And it's funny, it didn't start out that way, did it? Because in the early days, they were all.

Speaker 21 There's an amazing guy called Lord Kinnaird, who was president of the FA for 33 years.

Speaker 21 Extraordinary player.

Speaker 21 He played in nine FA Cup finals, five times on the winning side, three times for Wanderers, which is a mixed public schoolboys team, and twice for the Old Etonians.

Speaker 21 And he didn't just play football, he won the 350-yard race at Eton in 1864, the international canoe race at the 1867 Paris exhibition, two blues for tennis at Cambridge, and he was champion of Cambridge University in both fives and swimming.

Speaker 20 Extraordinary game. It was great in those days when you could be the best at everything,

Speaker 20 wasn't it? You were like the best soccer player, you were automatically going to be the best long jumper and the best

Speaker 20 tennis player and everything.

Speaker 20 But speaking of of the gentleman sports teams, the Corinthians, was a team of gentlemen that was so gentlemanly that if they got tackled in the penalty era, they would refuse the penalty because they thought there was no way that anyone could possibly have done it on purpose.

Speaker 20 That's right. I've got the actual quote for that here.
Yeah, C.B.

Speaker 20 Fry wrote, It is a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that the player intends to trip, hack, or push their opponents and behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kidney.

Speaker 20 Unscrupulous kidney, right?

Speaker 22 Brilliant. Cristiano Ronaldo thinks the same thing.

Speaker 20 It's just outrageous.

Speaker 20 All right, Andy, have you got anything to add? Yes, I have. We were talking about Cantona earlier, way back in distant memory.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 just a couple of extra things I found about him. After he retired from the game, he applied to register his name and the phrase U are Cantona as commercial trademarks.

Speaker 20 Just speaking of trademarking, I remember that when David Hasselhoff got divorced, part of his divorce settlement was that he claimed full and total use of the phrase, don't hassle the Hoff, and that his wife was not allowed in any circumstance to use that publicly or otherwise.

Speaker 20 That's great. We were on defences against crimes earlier.
I have not found any evidence that parking spaces are justification for murder.

Speaker 20 I have found someone who in France who did kill someone else over a parking space, but I'm not sure it counts as a crime of passion.

Speaker 21 I thought it was, yes, unlikely.

Speaker 20 But crime of passion has been recently reinstated partially as a defence

Speaker 20 in murder cases. In England.
Yeah.

Speaker 20 Last year.

Speaker 20 On Gurincha, the Brazilian footballer.

Speaker 20 So, four times in his career, he scored from a corner. Wow.
Which is

Speaker 20 the bandy legs coming in handy.

Speaker 20 And in one match against Fiorentina, he beat four defenders and the goalkeeper, and then he stopped short of the line to wait for the defenders to catch up with him and then beat them again and scored.

Speaker 20 Nice show, Belton.

Speaker 20 Okay, let's move on to fact number three, and that's yours, James.

Speaker 20 Okay, my fact is that in the first World Cup final in 1930, the two teams, Uruguay and Argentina, couldn't agree on the size of ball to use, and so they used Argentina's small ball in the first half and Uruguay's big ball in the second half.

Speaker 20 And it was such a difference that Argentina were 2-1 up at half-time when they were using their their small ball, and in the second half, Uruguay with the big ball went on to win 4-2.

Speaker 20 So it obviously made quite a big difference for the second half. So there was no official ball that was used? No, there was no official size to the ball at that time.
There is now.

Speaker 21 Wasn't there a thing with cricket when it started that nobody thought to define how wide a bat could be?

Speaker 21 So you could have an enormously wide bat, you know, that would completely cover the wicket.

Speaker 20 That's a brilliant thing.

Speaker 21 And there's there's an interesting thing I found out about there are four

Speaker 21 Olympic sports that have goals in them: football, hockey, water polo, and

Speaker 21 Hamble, yes.

Speaker 21 And there's an interesting thing called the penalty factor, which is because obviously goals are all different sizes and heights, and the balls are also different sizes, so that a football goal is twice as wide as a hockey goal, but the ball three times larger.

Speaker 21 And the penalty factor is the number that takes all these factors into account and works out how hard it is relatively to score a goal in any of those four sports.

Speaker 20 Oh, really?

Speaker 21 And surprisingly, they're all extraordinarily similar.

Speaker 20 Really? Wow. Do you think that's just trial and error that they ended up like that? I don't know.

Speaker 21 Yeah, it sort of feels like it, doesn't it? There's a really interesting little factoid, which is a football goal. You probably knew this, James.

Speaker 21 But I was saying, I knew nothing about football before this weekend. But the rule of QI, as you all know better than anybody, is that everything's interesting if it's looked at long enough.

Speaker 21 And it has been absolutely fascinating, actually. All these little side lights, like so, a football goal is eight yards wide and eight feet high.

Speaker 21 It's a really neat little thing, but of course, in metric, it doesn't look like anything interesting.

Speaker 20 No, you're right. FIFA did try and

Speaker 20 talk about widening the goals a few years ago because I think it was after the American World Cup, and they were trying to get Americans interested, and they thought, well, there aren't enough goals in soccer.

Speaker 20 And so they thought about making the goals wider by 50 centimetres on each side, which would have spoiled the 8x8. But also,

Speaker 20 a lot of of the goalkeepers went, well, people watch it because it's so difficult to score goals.

Speaker 20 I mean, if it becomes easy, if you can kick it into a bit where no goalkeeper can get to it, then it just spoils the game. There used to be as well.
The crossbar was not there initially.

Speaker 20 It was just like

Speaker 20 rugby, just two poles in the air.

Speaker 20 And they decided eventually to add the crossbar because people just kept lobbying it way over the height that any human could get and would estimate whether or not it had in fact gone between the two bars.

Speaker 20 The net was actually invented by an Everton fan who was so annoyed because not only was it a trick of the eye whether or not the ball had gone past the post on the inside or outside of the goal, but fans used to line up right back by the goal line and so they would just hit it with their hand or with their leg.

Speaker 20 So when a goal went in, it just went right back out again, and no one knew if it actually had made it through.

Speaker 20 There was a famous thing that happened a few years ago, it must be 10 years ago now, and I'm going to say it was Bristol City, but I might be wrong.

Speaker 20 And what they had, they had the net, but they had the advertising hoardings too close to the back of the net.

Speaker 20 So someone hit a shot, it went in, instead of making the net bulge, it hit the advertising hoardings, came back out, and they didn't give the goal because they didn't realise it had gone in.

Speaker 20 Oh, really? Yeah.

Speaker 21 Is Bristol City any good as a team?

Speaker 20 No.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I wondered why, because there was a famous line in Not the Nine O'Clock News, and Mel Smith is a newsreader reading out the headline. It says, Lord Lucan has been found.

Speaker 21 He's been playing centre-forward for Bristol City.

Speaker 20 I like it. Sorry to any Bristol City fans listening.
I'm a Tremier Rovers fan. They always beat us, but they are not a very good team now.
I remember I went to Bristol one time and

Speaker 20 we were driving down, we were trying to get to Ashton Gate, which is the Bristol City ground. And we stopped and we asked a guy, excuse me, can you tell us where Bristol City's football ground is?

Speaker 20 And he said, oh no, we don't play football around here.

Speaker 20 He was the captain of their team.

Speaker 20 Maybe it's Lord Lucan. I don't know.

Speaker 21 Any other interesting rules, James?

Speaker 20 There used to be no loitering allowed in football.

Speaker 20 The rules were, yeah, no loitering near the opponent's goal, which basically then later became the offside rule.

Speaker 20 I really like in the early days of football how things just went as people decided on the spur of the moment.

Speaker 20 So there was a match in 1894 in Sunderland versus Derby County, and basically the match was ready to start, except that the referee hadn't arrived because he'd missed his connecting train. And so they

Speaker 20 decided to go for it anyway they brought a guy in who knew how to referee as well he came into the match and they played 45 minutes and there was a 3-0 lead to Sunderland by half-time the referee arrived said what'd you do start the match without me no no no made it void started the match again they ended up playing a three-halved uh

Speaker 20 match wow do we know what the final score was yeah um it was five nil uh so sunderland still won but really it should have been 8-0 when the goalkeeper who had lost the match 8-0 was asked why they'd lost lost, he didn't blame the big defeat on the fact that the referee had messed them about by not showing up and then cancelling the points.

Speaker 20 And then so on. He blamed it because he said it was a failure of his to find any rice pudding in Sunderland before the match.
And his motto famously was, no pudding, no points.

Speaker 20 He ate a bowl of rice pudding before every match. So yeah, that was his excuse.

Speaker 20 Football, of course, evolved from like a village sport where two villagers would get a pig's bladder and they would try and get it from one village to the other.

Speaker 20 There's a game in 1280 at Olgham in Northumberland where a player was killed as a result of running against an opposing player's dagger.

Speaker 20 It sounds rather like he's getting blamed for being stamped. It's not my fault.
He ran into my dagger. Say that line in Chicago.

Speaker 22 He ran into my knife. He ran into my knife ten times.

Speaker 20 What? Also, it's interesting to see, again, how the game evolves and how all the rules come into play. Like, for example, the whistle.

Speaker 20 The whistle was quite a late introduction into football, and what they used to do was referees just used to wave a hanky anytime they needed to get the attention of the other players, and so it used to get passed down and like, oh, mate,

Speaker 20 hanky's being waved.

Speaker 20 Um, also, uh, Folk, apparently, this guy, Fatty Falk, who I mentioned earlier, um, supposedly the reason of ball boys being invented for the sport was a result of him because what they used to do was behind the goal to accentuate his size, six foot four, everyone else roughly five foot five, they used to place two two little boys behind the goal just to make him look way larger and more intimidating.

Speaker 20 And then anytime the ball went past, the boys just naturally went and grabbed the balls. And that supposedly was how ball boys came about.

Speaker 20 So it's a very naturally evolving sport.

Speaker 20 Just going back to the first World Cup with the two balls,

Speaker 20 the winning goal was scored by a guy called Hector Castro,

Speaker 20 which is quite impressive. First winning goal in the first World Cup final.
What's even more impressive is he only had one arm.

Speaker 20 And when he was thirteen years old, he accidentally amputated his right forearm while using an electric saw and his teammates nicknamed him El Manco.

Speaker 20 Andy, do you have anything to add? Yes, as well as variations in the size of the ball, there were variations in early matches between the kind of football code that you would use.

Speaker 20 So there were the Sheffield rules and the Nottingham rules and some

Speaker 20 matches took different sets of rules even for the first and second halves of the game. And in the early days as well, they turned up with different numbers of players.

Speaker 20 So teams were between nine and eighteen players, basically.

Speaker 20 John, earlier you mentioned the massive cricket bat that someone used. This is officially known as the Monster Bat Incident of 1771.

Speaker 20 So it was just one guy came up with a massive bat and coffee the whole wiki. Yeah, basically.
That's interesting.

Speaker 21 Yeah, but they suddenly produced some eight-foot stumps that

Speaker 20 they nailed in behind them.

Speaker 20 And a huge like Indiana Jones ball. Yeah.

Speaker 20 Coming down. Stone made of stone.

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Speaker 20 Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is you, Mr. John Lloyd.

Speaker 21 Okay, my fact is that FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association,

Speaker 21 has more members than the UN.

Speaker 21 Right. Which I think is surprising and counterintuitive.
Quite a lot more members, actually. It's got 17 more members than the UN.

Speaker 21 Most of these members are tiny little colonies like American Samoa, Anguilla, Aruba, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Curacao, Faroe Islands, Guam, Hong Kong is a member of FIFA, Macau, Montserrat, New Caledonia, Palestine is a member of FIFA, but not of the UN.

Speaker 21 And, of course, Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and Wales. And the upshot of this is that it is the reason, ultimately, why Britain doesn't have a football team in the Olympics.

Speaker 21 Probably the only national side, as far as I know, the only country in the world that never enters. The last three Olympics a British football team was in, 64, 68, and 1972, they didn't even qualify.

Speaker 21 They didn't even get in. Three years before that, they're knocked out in the first round.
So, this thing of Britain not being very good at football is actually really old. It goes right back to

Speaker 21 the 1920s. And in 2012, the host country doesn't have to qualify.
So, you just have a team by right.

Speaker 21 So, initially, the Scots, the Northern Irish, and the Welsh all refused to take part as official FAs. I don't know if that would change later.

Speaker 20 I think it did change. I think we did get a team in the end and fail miserably like we do in every tournament.

Speaker 22 And it was controversial, and they're not going to do it again, I think.

Speaker 20 Yeah, so the UK isn't a part of FIFA? Yeah. Why not? The good thing about not being part of FIFA is that you're not bound by their rules.

Speaker 20 So there's a story, you know, how Luis Suarez has been banned from all football for biting

Speaker 20 some guy.

Speaker 20 Well, there's a story that he might be able to go and train in Kosovo because they're not members of FIFA. Really? Which is a nice little loophole for him.
Yeah.

Speaker 20 I like as well that there's one of the teams that isn't a part of FIFA is Palau. Palau.
Palau, yeah.

Speaker 20 Whereas most of the other teams have a sort of quite legit reason, like the UK, for not joining, their one is actually just a slight admin error.

Speaker 20 They've been inactive since 1998 because their membership expired.

Speaker 20 But they've confirmed an intention to apply for membership again. So they are going to join eventually.
Yeah.

Speaker 22 Well, so they just failed to fill in the forms. Yeah, so

Speaker 20 who was in charge of filling the forms?

Speaker 22 It was 28 pages.

Speaker 20 Come on.

Speaker 22 So the Netherlands are now through to the semi-finals in the World Cup.

Speaker 20 Well, they might be through to the finals by the time they're in the future. They might be be through to the finals.

Speaker 22 They only booked their hotel in Brazil up till the 7th of July.

Speaker 22 And FIFA have organised for all of its sponsors and visiting dignitaries that were going to come just for the semi-finals and finals to move in. So they've had to kick out the Dutch team.

Speaker 22 So that's today that when we're recording this podcast, they've just been kicked out, so I'm not sure where they're going to stay.

Speaker 20 Well, they could probably have the English camp. There you go.

Speaker 21 A thing that struck me forcibly looking at the Olympic history is that on average today, one football match in four anywhere in the world is a draw?

Speaker 21 Whereas if you look at the early scores, in the 1908 Olympics,

Speaker 21 which is won by Britain 2-0 against Denmark in the final, and the Danish team included pure mathematician Harold Bohr, who's brother of the physicist Niels Bohr, who's, as you know, and you probably know, an accomplished goalkeeper himself.

Speaker 21 And Harold Bohr scored twice in Denmark's opening game. And in the quarter-finals, Britain beat Sweden 12-1, and Denmark beat France B-team 9-1.
In the semis, Denmark beat France 17-1.

Speaker 20 I think in the first World Cup, both semi-finals were like 7-1 or 8-1 or something like that.

Speaker 20 But just going back to Niels Bott, being in a goalkeeper, he once said that he let in an outrageously long shot due to being distracted by a mathematical problem.

Speaker 21 There's another nice thing.

Speaker 21 In the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, in the final between Belgium and Czechoslovakia, for the only time in football history, the competition couldn't be completed because the Czechs walked off the pitch complaining of bias by the officials who are all English for sending one of their players off and intimidation by Belgian soldiers in the in the crowd so that they they just walked off and that was the end of it um you mentioned the FA they were responsible for banning women's football for 50 years which isn't unusual and was banned in a lot of countries but um the women's football around uh just post the first world war and up until 1921 when it was banned was more popular than men's football and women's matches would draw bigger crowds.

Speaker 22 The biggest ladies' team was a ladies' team from Preston called Dick Curs.

Speaker 22 But their match was played in 1920 at Goodison Park in Liverpool, and it drew a crowd of 53,000 people, with another 10,000 to 15,000 reportedly turned away.

Speaker 22 And the justification for the FA banning women from playing on any FA-approved grounds, which was effectively the same, was that women were too frail to play football and they'd be too easily injured.

Speaker 22 And it was basically seemed to be that it was drawing attention and crowds away from men's football.

Speaker 20 It was always the most popular in America for the last 20 years. Women's football has been much more popular than men's football.
Has it? Especially in schools. I have a match,

Speaker 20 a ladies' match from May 1881 and it was an England versus Scotland match done played in Scotland and this is the review of it from Bell's Life newspaper. So it has come at last.

Speaker 20 What next?

Speaker 20 The event that has had the paper so agitated was a women's football match.

Speaker 20 Several years ago, there was a rage for silly displays of certain kinds of athletics by women, but we thought the time had passed.

Speaker 20 To give the arrangement any semblance of an international event, the girls had the cheek to designate the farce England versus Scotland. So, not a good review for the opening.

Speaker 22 Not a great analysis of the football played.

Speaker 20 No. Oscar Wilde said: football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but it is hardly suitable for delicate boys.

Speaker 20 That's good. I read about the female, the North Korean female football team,

Speaker 20 which has a fantastic history. And it's another thing.
I love that North Korea is a part of FIFA. Well, they're in the last World Cup.
Yeah, yeah, they're in the last World Cup.

Speaker 21 I think it is in that way a force for good, is that for a moment, as it were,

Speaker 21 violent nationalities forgotten in favour of friendly competition. Exactly.

Speaker 20 I mean, there were conditions, apparently, in North Korea whereby you could only watch a match if they'd already watched it and saw that North Korea had won, which meant they didn't watch any matches.

Speaker 20 I don't know if I've said this before, I might have done. In the last World Cup, they'd played, I think, Brazil in the first game, and they'd lost like 3-2 or 4-2, but it had been a really good game.

Speaker 20 And everyone thought, wow, this North Korea team is actually quite good. They've got a good chance.
And so they didn't show the first game in North Korea, but they showed the highlights afterwards.

Speaker 20 And they thought, well, actually, we're doing pretty well. So we will show the next game live.
And they played Portugal and they lost 7-1

Speaker 20 or 7-0 or something like that. They got absolutely battered.
They also in 2011 in the World Cup in Germany, North Korea lost 2-0 to America.

Speaker 20 And their coach said that the team played such a bad way on that match because a few days ago, five of their players were struck by lightning.

Speaker 20 That was unfortunate for them. And also the coach claimed that he was being coached

Speaker 20 by Kim Jong-il via an invisible mobile phone that the theory leader had invented himself. So he was getting coaching tips on that.

Speaker 20 The team then eventually got busted for having steroids, for using steroids. The reason they were using the steroids supposedly was to help them recover from the lightning strike from the days before.

Speaker 20 But they also, this is really nice, in 1999 at the Women's World Cup, which was held in America, the North Korean players arrived.

Speaker 20 But FIFA got really concerned about one of the players' dental care because it just they hadn't had proper dental care. Their teeth were looking really bad.
So they gave her free treatment.

Speaker 20 It was paid by FIFA free treatment.

Speaker 20 And then all the other players on the team faked sort of phantom teeth illnesses so they could all get their teeth done as well.

Speaker 20 So they didn't win any matches, but they all went back to North Korea with fantastic teeth. They were like, why are they smiling so much? They've lost all their games now.

Speaker 20 Does anyone have anything to throw in before we go to Air Force?

Speaker 21 I do, actually. I want to tell you this fantastic story about the Island of Grenada against Barbados in the Shell Caribbean Cup of 1994.
Do you know this story?

Speaker 20 No, no, it sounds great.

Speaker 21 It's one of the weirdest football matches you ever heard of. So it was the last of the group stage, okay?

Speaker 21 So Barbados had to beat Grenada by two goals to go through to the next round on goal difference. And if they failed, then Grenada would go through.

Speaker 21 So at that time, the organisers had introduced a new rule for golden goals. Okay.

Speaker 21 And they said a golden goal, if it's scored, will count for two goals because a golden goal, by definition, ends the match. It's not fair on people who win matches by golden goals.

Speaker 21 So a golden goal counted for two, okay? So Barbados took an early 2-0 lead, and they were doing really well. They held that all the way through the first half.

Speaker 21 They were playing great in the second half. It looked like they were going to coast through that 2-0 lead into the knockout stages when Grenada suddenly scored and made it 2-1.

Speaker 21 And it was seven minutes from the end of the match. So the Barbadians, the Bajans said, right, the chance of scoring a third goal in seven minutes are very small.

Speaker 21 So they turned round and shot into their own goal, making it a draw, which meant as it was a draw,

Speaker 21 when the match was over, they would have to go to extra time. Yeah.
And they had a chance of a 2-0 lead with the new golden goal rule.

Speaker 20 That's brilliant.

Speaker 21 So then they turn round, score an old goal, so it's two all, and it's three minutes to go. So Grenada now has to be really intelligent, and they think, right,

Speaker 21 it doesn't matter which end we score at,

Speaker 21 as long as it's not a draw,

Speaker 21 it will be only a one-goal difference and we'll go through.

Speaker 20 So, first of all, they rush up to the Barbasian and they say, no, wait a minute, let's go the other way. They go back

Speaker 21 to their own goal. Meanwhile, the Bayesian team realize, we've got to defend the Grenadian and goal.

Speaker 20 So the whole team go round and, like a penalty wall, block the grenade and goal, which they successfully do.

Speaker 21 Full-time is called at two all, and they go to extra time, and Barbados wins a golden goal in five minutes.

Speaker 20 Oh, wow. Oh, brilliant.
That's a great story.

Speaker 20 Brilliant.

Speaker 20 Okay, Andy, any final facts that are in here? Well, you got everything just about correct there, I think. I couldn't find any mistakes.
There's a cup rather nicely called the Elf Cup. Oh.
Yeah. Which

Speaker 20 took place in 2006 between Crimea, Greenland, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Tibet, Northern Cyprus, and Zanzibar. I bet Northern Cyprus won that because they're like a really good team, aren't they?

Speaker 20 They hosted it and they won it.

Speaker 20 And one of the early women's football teams was called the Honeyballers, which is just rather nice.

Speaker 20 And their team captain was a lady called Mary Hudson, but she played under a pseudonym because of the ban.

Speaker 20 And the FA have since apologised for the ban.

Speaker 22 I do know that, amusingly, in Germany, when they allowed women to play football, then they were only allowed to play it in warm weather.

Speaker 20 Okay, that's it. That's the end of our podcast.
That's all of our facts. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 20 If you want to get in contact with any of us about the stuff that we've said on today's show, you can get us all on our Twitter handles.

Speaker 20 I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M. Anna,

Speaker 22 you can get me on podcast at qi.com. Email me there.

Speaker 20 And John. John, you don't have a Twitter.

Speaker 21 No, I'm taking over at Wikipedia.

Speaker 20 Yeah, or you can reach them on 0779.

Speaker 20 If you want to find out any more about the things that we've been talking about on this week's episode, you can head over to qi.com/slash podcast where we're going to have videos, we're going to have links, and you can also find all of our previous episodes for this series, including our international fatball series, which was a football podcast which made no mention of football whatsoever.

Speaker 20 That's it for us this week. We're going to be back again next week and tune in again.
Thanks so much. Goodbye.

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